I spread my legs, drawing up my sarong, the colour of burnt dust, past my thigh. The
fabric clings to my skin, wet with sweat. Every Friday, Nikola takes the long way home, circling the brittle edge of our camp in Coober Pedy like a dingo sniffing heat. Nothing’s pretty in this part of Australia. But underneath this stained cotton, something glows. His weekly tease.
The heat is horrendous. Ngunytju, mother, says heat like this used to be a season. Now, it’s a sentence. It’s 5.4 degrees hotter now than when she wed beneath the same red sky. She tells me, voice gone soft, that it could warm another seven degrees by the time the babies I bring into this world are old enough to marry. Her voice goes dry when she says it, like the thought has scorched her tongue.
Nikola loves it when I sweat like this, dark clumps of moisture pooling under my breasts and around my collarbone. He lingers by the door frame, now ripped off its hinges, yawning to let the stale breeze wander through our shack of tin and crumbling cement. It does little. But it gives him a good view.
My bedroom runs parallel to the door—a theatre box. I pull off my top, slow like melted sugar, and let my breasts breathe. In their prime, full and round, they still defy the world’s attempts to flatten them. I lick a finger and draw it down between them. Nikola licks his lips. He thinks this is all for him.
I never let him cross the threshold. This illusion would shatter. But then again, would a rich white boy like him even notice my history, sweating from the walls? We keep our distance. That’s what makes this last. Our ritual. We’ve been maturing together for years, a private show of watching, imagining, blossoming, aching. The tease gives me enough dopamine to forget the clay oven I’m dying in.
When it’s his turn to perform, he gives me the signal. A stone kicked just so against the wall of my shack. When I walk to him, it’s only when the sun has dipped far enough to let my skin survive the journey.
His family lives below. A ‘dugout’, he calls it, slow and soft in that syrup-thick accent of his. His parents’ home is a cool and carved luxury tomb. Always the same, perfect temperature. His father, a miner with an artistic streak, has carved out entire rooms in the rock. Bathrooms echo with marble, there is a games room and a cinema den. This is the kind of space that doesn’t just shelter, it forgets. Forgets the heat. Forgets hardship. Forgets us.
Nikola once said, half-laughing, “It’s like living in the future down here.” He didn’t see me flinch. His future doesn’t include melting skin.
The first time I stepped inside, I imagined falling into a castle. Door after door after door. And there he was, my Nikola, framed in an arched doorway, trousers dropped to the floor, boxers slipping with teasing grace. His hands around himself, moaning my name like a prayer. I fantasised about the day I would feel him inside me. Take me here, I thought, in this dugout, where my body can surrender to your cold walls and floor. I imagined the moans, a potent mix of pleasure and climactic relief.
But to step forward would be to admit the imbalance. That his hunger comes from desire, and mine from distraction. Because in his underground world, his heat is a fantasy. Above ground, mine is death. The sun kills us in slow punishment.
Mum’s good friend, Nyangka, died just last week. Her heart gone wrong. Heat’s cruel kiss. The health worker said it was linked to “ongoing extreme temperature exposure”. But we already knew. We’ve known for years.
Above, we’re not on the grid. We rely on diesel generators and intermittent solar. Air con exists. Sure. But it’s for the rich, or the ones with money from opals or tourists.
Nikola’s visits stretch longer between each visit now. Ngunytju, spending more time at the Umoona Tjutagku Health Service, where the air con never dies and the water is free. She goes there most days late in the afternoon, when her breathing feels too hard. The worry dries me out. And I think: if I stay too long in this limbo, watching the man I can’t touch while my mother wilts in silence, what will be left of me?
So when Nikola still comes to linger at my doorway, not tiring of my body as it shifts, widens to carry life, hair curling where skin once gleamed, it keeps me alight. But he never sees the suffering beneath my shimmer. He sees the shape of my breasts, not the politics in my sweat. Nor the resistance in my thighs.
He sees a show. An escape from his air-conditioned guilt. And I drank it in. I watch him watching me, and weigh his gaze like gold dust in a prospector’s pan. Will it ever be enough?
I, too, need an escape. I go inward. Dig deep, into my own place where heat can’t destroy me.
Where the sweat and ache of me are not symptoms, but power. I sink my fingers into myself, feeling the wet bloom, never looking away from Nikola’s dark, hungry eyes.
And in that moment, I am not forgotten. I am fire.
I am my old people’s dream.
I am my country, still burning.
Still alive. I am not done yet.
There’s something apocalyptic about Dugout, something shocking, that heat that fills us with fear, but class pride also emerges, and there are echoes of colonialism and privilege, without falling into victimhood or surrender. This is a sensual story, where the senses take on enormous importance: the author makes us feel the heat and the cold, also the play of desire that breaks all authority and social distance, the power, the abundance of pleasure, and the saying, “Here I am, here we are, they haven’t been able to destroy us yet”.
María Fernanda Ampuero
“Dugout” enforces a strong gravitational pull, engaging in its language and unique and uncanny premise. Its rhythm and pacing and the shadows of life and identity provide a powerful look into what it means to exist as human through the isolating factors of the physical and the spiritual. Symbolic and profound in its layering, leaving a loud exhalation at the end.
Shome Dasgupta
Emma Oldham (she/her) is an award-winning Conservation Biologist and published children’s author based in Newark-on-Trent, England. Her passion for wildlife and storytelling took root in childhood, never far from a notepad or a rescued creature. This early curiosity has blossomed into a lifelong mission: exploring how stories illuminate our relationship with the natural world. Her work has received national recognition, including the 2023 Women of the Future Award, the 2024 Novi Third Sector Leader Award, and a place on the 2024 ENDS Power List. She is currently pursuing an MA in Creative Writing at the University of Lincoln.
Oxford Flash Fiction Prize 